Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
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| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added letters | |
| passage added above the line | passage with added text above |
| passage added on the line | passage with added text inline |
| passage added in the margin | passage with text added in margin |
| handwritten addition to a typewritten letter | typed passage with added handwritten text |
| missing or unreadable text | missing text noted with "[illegible]" |
| uncertain transcriptions | word[?] |
| notes written by someone other than Willa Cather | Note in another's hand |
| printed letterhead text | printed text |
| text printed on postcards, envelopes, etc. | printed text |
| text of date and place stamps | stamped text |
| passage written by Cather on separate enclosure. | written text |
This foolish letter was written to H.W. Boynton1, not to Percy Boynton3.
Willa Cather June 11th 1937 FIVE BANK STREET March 7, 1916 Dear Mr. Boynton1:Your reply to my note half-converts me to the wooly “theory of Vibrations” which
fortune-tellers and theosophists tell about. When you say that you feel some
curiosity about what I am doing now, I can only say, nothing that interests me very
deeply; something rather dry and hard. Perhaps I’m doing it for the same reason that
violinists play Bach4 after they have been
working on very romantic modern things. The next book5
was pretty well planned out6, the
intention of it, at least, last fall. But the winter has been full of changes and
troubles. The les loss of old friends by death and
even by marriage, until I feel like the man “whom unmerciful
disaster followed fast and followed faster.”7 The milk has been too much
disturbed for the cream to rise. I am just beginning to keep engagements with my
desk again, and I hope, if you come into town2 this spring, that I may have some progress to report to you.
If you will let me know when you do come to town, and if you have time to hunt up
Bank Street8, I shall certainly be
at home, even if it is not on a Friday.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2935.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2935
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Henry Walcott Boynton1
- Date letter was written
- March 7, 1916
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 8575), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
By late summer of 1916, Cather told her editor Ferris Greenslet that her next book would be called "The Blue Mesa." Later in the fall of 1916 she abandoned that manuscript and started writing the novel that would become My Ántonia.
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Person Annotations
Boynton, H. W. (1869-1947). American critic. Connecticut-born Henry Walcott Boynton received his BA and MA from Amherst College in Massachusetts and taught English at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA from 1892 to 1901. He reviewed books for the Atlantic Monthly from 1901 to 1904, for the Nation and the New York Evening Post from 1912, and for Bookman from 1915. Cather was particularly pleased with his reviews of O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), writing him to thank him particularly for his review of The Song of the Lark, and inviting him to her Friday teas. Boynton also edited volumes of American and British classic works.
Boynton, Percy Holmes (1875-1946). American professor of English. Born in Newark, NJ, son of George M. Boynton and Julia Holmes Boynton, Percy Boynton received his BA from Amherst in 1897 and his MA from Harvard in 1898. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1903, where he remained until his retirement in 1941. He published several books on contemporary American fiction. Boynton married Lois Damon; they had two sons. Henry Walcott Boynton, with whom Cather corresponded, was Percy Boynton’s elder brother.
Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750). German composer. Born in
Eisenach, Germany, into a family of musicians, Johann Sebastian Bach was a
preeminent baroque-era composer, whose most famous works include: "Toccata
and Fugue in D minor," "Mass in B Minor" (1724-1749), the "Brandenburg
Concertos" (1711-1720), and "The Well-Tempered Clavier" (1722-1740). After
hearing Yehudi Menuhin play Bach in concert Cather wrote, “I think that was
the most beautiful and lofty music I have ever listened to” (#2048).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"Blue Mesa, The" (unpublished) by Willa Cather
"The Raven," New York Evening Mirror (Janurary 29, 1845) by Edgar Allan Poe
